Macbook Season: Guide to the 2020 Holiday Lineup

Well…It’s that time of year again

As we’re quickly approaching the holiday season, many are wondering if now’s a good time to upgrade their existing laptops and compare what’s out there in the market.

Deals are going to be in the works for all the major laptop brands. Here at Decorris List, we’ve had some hands-on experience with Macbooks and we’ve always found them to be wonderful machines.

Up for this year is the 2020 model for Apple’s Macbook Air.  These are coming in both an i3 and an i5 spec.

Macbook Air i3

Macbook Air i5

Let’s get down to business

The new MacBook Air is packing serious performance into just 1.29 kilos. As mentioned before, the i3 and i5 are the typical base models but if you visit the Apple store yourself, you’re able to configure one with an available quad-core Intel Core i7 processor.

Now as a side note – the Intel Core i7 processor delivers up to 2x faster CPU performance1 and up to 80 per cent faster graphics performance, to help you power through everything from browsing the web to playing games to editing video. I’d only recommend this steep upgrade for those looking to really push their machines to the limits – think music production, video editing, day trading applications. 

The MacBook Air with 1.1 GHz dual core Intel Core i3 processor starts at £999 £949, while the MacBook Air with 1.1GHz quad-core Intel Core i5 processor starts at £1,299 £1,185.

However, we’ve got special deals through our Amazon partnership to help chip away at those prices.

The MacBook Air now features the new Magic Keyboard, first seen on the 16-inch MacBook Pro. The refined scissor mechanism with 1mm of travel delivers a responsive, comfortable and quiet typing experience. The inverted “T” arrow keys help you fly through lines of code, spreadsheets or game environments. And the backlit keys with ambient light sensor help you type in low-light settings.

The new trackpad has also been improved with 20% more surface area. The Force Touch trackpad is one of the best in the world. It lets you interact with your Mac in a variety of ways based on subtle differences in pressure. You have precise control and a uniform response — no matter where you click the trackpad — as well as plenty of room for Multi-Touch gestures like pinch and zoom. Your fingers will feel right at home.

i3 vs i5

We’re not going to spend all day waxing lyrical over every single statistic for each of these.  The nice thing about the MacBook Air i3 and MacBook Air i5 is that the stats are pretty much the same for both.  The only difference is the size of the SSD storage.

Your i3 will come with the standard 256GB SSD while the i5 is upgraded to a 512GB SSD.

1.1GHz dual-core 10th-generation Intel Core i3 processor with Turbo Boost up to 3.2GHz

8GB 3733MHz LPDDR4X memory

256GB SSD storage vs 512GB SSD for i5

Intel Iris Plus Graphics

13.3-inch Retina 2560-by-1600 sRGB display with True Tone

Two Thunderbolt 3 ports

Touch ID

Force Touch trackpad

Macbook Air i3

Macbook Air i5

The i3 ‌MacBook Air‌ is perfectly fine for day-to-day tasks like web browsing, emails, streaming or word-processing, and video calls. Even when you connect the i3 to an external display, the performance is consistent and you’re not losing any quality or forcing the system to work at full capacity. It will start to struggle a bit when you ask it to do labour intensive tasks like 4k video editing, some photo editing, music production and multitasking.

So that’s not to say you can’t do these things, it’s just a caution that trying to do too many things at the same time will cause a dip in performance.

Now since the i3 is the lower-power processor, this means it’s wont get as hot as it’s bigger sibling, the i5.

The i5 ‌MacBook Air‌ does have more to give than the i3, and you’ll expect it to handle multi-tasking and the previously mentioned tasks easier. This is partly due to the higher Turbo Boost Speed at 3.5GHz, compared to the 3.2GHz speed of the i3. So your video editing, music production and streaming can take place at the same time.

Some users have reported that the beefier i5 does run a bit warmer than the i3. You would expect this with the additional processing power and super thin design.  Remember – the heat generated has to be expelled at some point so you’ll no doubt hear the fans running.

In our opinion, the i5 MacBook Air is the choice to go for when it comes to multitasking and high demand workflows.  What really makes the i3 appealing is the sub £1k price tag – which let’s be honest, we’ve been waiting for that for a while.

Everyday use?

Multitasking?

Which MacBook Air Should I Buy?

This really comes down to what tasks are you mostly going to be doing and what budget are you working with? If it’s day-to-day work, school, and casual computing then the i3 will have more than enough to cope with your applications. If you’re doing more intense workflows, running demanding programs and need constant multi-tasking then definitely spend the extra for the i5.